My first summer in California I had recurrent dreams of rain. I was an alien from New England and longed, even in sleep, for the familiar four seasons of home. What was normal to the natives felt like a dangerously drawn-out dry spell to me. It was 1978, and I’d just married a Stanford medical student. We were renting a tiny house on a lot nearly as narrow as the house but so deep some previous occupant had planted apple, plum, apricot, peach, fig and lemon trees, and a profusion of blackberry and raspberry vines, all producing masses of fruit despite the drought.
An Eden, but so arid! I dreamed, nightly, of rain. I would be outside, face lifted, rain landing in my open eyes and running down my cheeks and arms, overwhelmed by relief that the natural order of the world, as I knew it, was restored.
By day I labored under the puritanical delusion that every fruit and berry must be harvested. A neighbor taught me how to make fruit leather. I pitted plums and apricots and put them in the blender with lemon juice, to preserve their color. Then I poured purple and orange puddles of puree on plastic wrap stretched over plywood balanced on two kitchen chairs in the full sun. In no time at all it became leather. Awed by the bounty of my back yard, I rolled bright cylinders in plastic wrap and stowed them in the deep freeze we’d installed in the garage.
When my husband wasn’t doing one clinical rotation or another, we made 54 pies and froze them, unbaked. I made jam. I bought a juicer and produced bland apple juice that bore no resemblance to New England’s cider and made me homesick. I tried to eat all the figs.
By the time the rains began, we’d made friends with someone who collected feature-length films and owned a screen and projector. Masses of medical students lay on our tiny living room floor and watched Rear Window, or Vertigo. We served hot homemade pies, heaped with Dreyer’s vanilla ice cream. I confess it was really, really fun in a way New England wasn’t.
Another year I was a Stanford student too, biking down University Avenue into the stately cloister of Palm Drive. I reveled in lectures by Ian Watt. I cried when John Lennon got shot. Then I was pregnant with our first child, teaching freshman composition and still biking between those palms as California began its now familiar eruption into green as the rains began. Drunk on hormones and pollen, I stopped often to smell flowers. My recurrent dreams had stopped.
It snowed a foot yesterday, here in western Massachusetts. I spent hours shoveling, for I live alone. The kids are grown; my marriage ended long ago. The plastic shovel is worn from being pushed along like a snowplow before I heave its contents.
It must already be green all the length of Palm Drive, I thought. Then I remembered my friend Robyn Warhol, who flew to Boston, city of my birth, for an interview and came back insisting everyone had a grayish look, as if he or she hadn’t showered recently. Even people’s clothes, she said, tended to be gray or brown, colorless.
She’s in the English department at the University of Vermont now. Ha!
Did she ever adjust to the Northeast? I wiggled my fingers and toes, stiff with cold despite my exertions with my battered shovel, and felt homesick for the West Coast and those six years of my pie-eating youth.
I remembered wonderful places in Menlo Park and Palo Alto where an invasive species of morning glory regularly festooned large areas with purple trumpets shot with fuchsia. Innumerable flowers hung in psychedelic sheets from telephone poles or fences in vacant lots.
Now I noted the way falling snow had draped even the smallest gray twigs in white—the exquisitely colorless colors of winter.
I’m a hybrid, I thought, altered forever by all that fruit, Stanford’s cloisters, fields of artichokes stretching to the sea. I’m a hybrid not just of coasts, but years. Though my hair is nearly as white as the snow I’m flinging, inside me a young woman is forever pouring plum puree in the bright sun.
SARAH DIXWELL BROWN, MA ’81, writes and teaches in Amherst, Mass.
